'A win for the old school'

Thursday

DURHAM — With seniors Luke Maye and Cameron Johnson performing the heaviest lifting and North Carolina producing around the basket to a dominating degree, this became a victory of a certain vintage.

“It definitely was a win for the old school,” guard Kenny Williams said, after the eighth-ranked Tar Heels defeated Zion Williamson-less Duke 88-72 in Atlantic Coast Conference basketball, serving up a takedown of their archrival and the nation’s top-ranked team all rolled into one Wednesday night at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Maye poured in 30 points and collected 15 rebounds, and Johnson supplied 26 points as North Carolina (21-5 overall, 11-2 ACC) roared to a 22-point lead early in the second half and won convincingly, climbing into a three-way tie for first place atop the league standings.

That the Tar Heels missed their first 12 attempts from 3-point range and finished just 2-for-20 from long distance did nothing to derail them. They attacked inside the arc and buried the Blue Devils beneath a 62-28 margin in points scored in the lane area.

Maye and Johnson connected on a combined 25-for-41 from the field, the veteran pair delivering powerfully efficient stuff on this spotlighted stage packed with so many star freshmen — and so much surrounding star power, including former President Barack Obama, filmmaker Spike Lee, baseball immortal Ken Griffey Jr. and All-Pro running back Todd Gurley.

“We’ve been in these situations before,” Johnson said. “To win against the No. 1 team at their building is big, obviously, but it’s a little sweeter to say we won our last game here.”

RJ Barrett’s 33 points and Cam Reddish’s 27 points accounted for the majority of the scoring load for Duke (23-3, 11-2), which saw its nine-game winning streak end and lost Williamson, college basketball’s biggest attraction and perhaps most destructive force, to a knee injury moments after tip-off — on the first possession of the game.

Williamson’s left foot tore through his sneaker, his Nike coming apart at the seams as he planted to make a move on Maye near the free-throw line and then slipped awkwardly, going down on the court in pain. He limped off, defective shoe in hand, with only 34 seconds elapsed.

“Be honest, everybody be honest,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said during his postgame comments to reporters. “When the big fella goes out of the game, it changes a lot of things for them.”

Duke seemingly never regrouped. The Blue Devils missed 21 of their first 28 shots — while North Carolina built a 13-point lead in the first half — and finished at just 34.7 percent from the field on the night.

Garrison Brooks contributed 14 points for the Tar Heels, who seized complete control early in the second half and maintained a double-digit lead that never dipped below 13 in this charged environment across the game’s final 17½ minutes. North Carolina improved to 7-0 in ACC road games this season.

“There’s no better feeling, man,” Kenny Williams said. “To come in here and get a win, it’s very few feelings that are better than this. It’s just a whole bunch of joy around.”

North Carolina used a 15-2 burst in a rapid matter of 2:47 to pile up a 59-37 lead, its largest of the night, four-plus minutes into the second half. The Tar Heels hit seven straight shots during the run, effectively the clinching stretch, with Maye and Johnson pumping in five of those buckets.

“I feel like we were wearing them down,” Johnson said.

North Carolina led 42-32 at halftime on Brooks’ muscular dunk in transition just before the first-half buzzer, the capper to a wild end-to-end sequence during the final 15 seconds.

Reddish’s desperation 3-pointer from deep near the sideline opened the door for Johnson to leak out for an uncontested dunk ahead of the pack — only Johnson blew that easy chance, and so Reddish headed back the other way dribbling on the run.

He passed, but that was intercepted by Seventh Woods with about five seconds remaining. Woods quickly pushed it in the Tar Heels’ direction and fed Brooks, who hammered home the dunk.

Whew.

Maye had scored 18 points by that juncture, with 14 of them coming during the opening 14 minutes. Johnson had added 12 points for North Carolina, which needed almost 17 minutes of game time to finally sink a 3-pointer, but went 17-for-26 in the first half from everywhere else inside the arc.

“Luke was Luke and Cam was Cam,” Williams said. “That’s nothing new to us. They’ve been playing that well all season.”